


[robot heart emoji]

by wanderNavi



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Apparently more likely than you think, Getting Together, Injury Recovery, M/M, but robot edition, robin is a sassy android?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:28:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25883614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderNavi/pseuds/wanderNavi
Summary: Robin teased, “Chrom, are you so cruel you’d love a robot?”“I’ll love who I like,” Chrom muttered mutinously.
Relationships: Chrom & My Unit | Reflet | Robin, Chrom/My Unit | Reflet | Robin
Comments: 2
Kudos: 65





	[robot heart emoji]

**Author's Note:**

> taking a break from much longer fics to post this

They laid Robin out in about five pieces atop the matte black workbench, with the harshly bright overhead lights exposing every silvery gleam of his ripped wires and broken values along the places his head and limbs were torn off and his torso caved open. Chrom kicked the hated duffel bag he carried him in out of the way and, more importantly, out of sight. Swooping in with morbid delight, Anna prodded at the shredded synthetic skin around the wrecked port of Robin’s right knee.

“What happened to him?” she asked.

Begrudgingly, Chrom told her, “Bad run in with a scimitar classed titan and a further bad run in with a pile of rebar and rubble at over ninety miles an hour.”

She whistled. “What did you do that to him for?”

“What did _I_ –” Chrom sputtered then snapped, “Can you fix him or not?”

Anna and Gregor glanced at each other, shrugged somewhat lackadaisically, and turned back to Chrom. She said, “Sure we can fix him, but it’ll cost you.”

Chrom sighed; he hadn’t expected anything else. “How much?”

“Two million.”

“ _Nothing over one million_ ,” he shot back with growing rage.

Gregor poked something in Robin’s exposed chest with a spanner. “Here, you see it?” he said. “Very rare part. Very smashed part. Market price? Very expensive.”

“I’m already giving you a discount for being a regular customer, Chrom,” Anna told him with crossed arms and a trickle of friendly sympathy that managed to worm its way past her entrepreneurial hunger for a deal. “I’d say take it or leave it, but Robin’s not looking good. This is the best price and the best service you’re going to get in this star system. And don’t even think about taking him through a warp in that duffle bag. The flash of radiation will instantly fry all his exposed parts and you can say goodbye to him for good.”

Chrom grit his teeth and looked back down at the carnage laid out on the workbench, that wouldn’t be there if Chrom paid just a thread more attention and _moved_ instead of turning around in horror just in time to see the smashing blow meant for him collide with Robin with a sickening crunch. He ground out, “I could just put him in one of our shielded rooms. Two million is still highway robbery.”

“Fine, we’ll take off ten grand,” Anna said.

“Fifty grand,” Chrom pushed.

“Chrom,” Anna said exasperatedly, “Do you want to see your boyfriend alive again or not?”

“ _He’s not my boyfriend_.”

* * *

Gregor physically hauled Chrom up by his armpits and threw him out of the shop by the end of the third day, so Chrom found himself both 1.8 million credits short compared to last week and buzzing with directionless anxiety. He didn’t have any jobs he could do, not by himself, and if he harried off for even a minor scuffle, Robin _would_ strap a leash on him for at least a month. Instead, he settled for calling Emmeryn and Lissa at length.

“Chrom, I am in the middle of finals,” Lissa hollered. “If you call me _one more time_ , I’ll show you what we learn in anatomy class.”

“Alright, alright,” Chrom backed off, alarmed. “No need to bring out any knives, I’ll leave you alone.”

For everyone’s sanity, Anna let him back in after one week more, so he had a front row seat watching as she and Gregor ran one last set of checks, then booted Robin back up. Time pressed down upon Chrom with all the weight of a star’s gravity in each agonizing second it took Robin’s processors to load and calibrate. Every one of Chrom’s nerves felt like they were being pulled apart at the atomic level with the strength of a black hole as he tipped past the event horizon where no hope or light could escape.

Robin blinked awake with a bur of static in his voice, “What? Oh. Hello.” He caught sight of Anna and Gregor’s buzzard-like hovering.

Flat-eyed and monotoned, he said, “I see. Well.”

“Robin,” Chrom said desperately, and then couldn’t continue anymore as Robin grabbed Chrom’s hand with his cool palm, immediately and unseeingly, and squeezed in assurance.

Turning a kind smile that softened the flexiplastic of his face towards his distressed friend, Robin asked, “Help me up?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Chrom grabbed Robin by his right arm with one hand and braced the other hand against his back. He sat up with the whine of new motors.

The moment his feet touched the concrete floor, Robin leveled a frigid smile in the mechanists’ direction and asked, “How much did you swindle from Chrom’s wallet this time?”

“Oh, you know,” Anna said breezily. “Our usual operating margin.”

At that, Robin immediately treated everyone to the auditory nightmare of an android running a full integration system check on over sixteen thousand unique components all at once. “Your usual margins,” he said in the low emotionless default of a newly installed language module, “on all this?”

Anna’s partner in crime said, “Gregor sent you full invoice. You connect online –”

“I see it,” Robin interrupted and then settled into a blank silence for longer than it should have taken him to process twenty megabytes of standardized information. Chrom whirled in anger towards Anna and Gregor; what have they done to Robin, did they tamper with his central processors, did –

“Well, everything looks to be in order!” Robin suddenly declared with an alarming in a whole new form of cheer. Off kilter, Chrom turned back to him as he stood up and strode off in search of clothing, not looking at Chrom once along the way. “We’ll be leaving then, places to go, people to see.”

* * *

The very first thing Robin did, once they got back to port and passed their way through the onerously complex and byzantine sanitation and security checks, back onboard their ship, was run a finger across a panel’s surface and sigh at the dust he picked up. Which was completely unfair, “ _Hey_ ,” Chrom protested when Robin turned his disappointed face towards him.

“I’m out for seventeen days and I come back to our baby ship falling into disrepair,” lamented Robin.

Chrom threw the duffle bag at Robin’s face, who laughed and caught it with ease. Brushing past, Chrom said, “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

Once in deep space, he turned in the pilot’s seat and caught Robin watching him with an indulgent expression, the subtleties of emotion on his face and draped in his limbs so much more precise and fluid than any other android Chrom saw before that it snatched the breath from his lungs every time.

It’s exactly that fluidity that set Frederick on edge for so long around Robin, after Chrom and Emmeryn came home from what should have been a pleasant vacation but turned into a violent, drawn out mess of multiple attempted kidnappings instead. He hadn’t realized Robin wasn’t human until Lissa rushed forward and tried to take a pulse of the unconscious man before her siblings could warn her of the futility in the gesture. The next best androids, a pale second place, came from the Ferox freelancers and those could never match the warmth in Robin’s fingertips as he set a grounding hand upon Chrom shoulders, or the fierce delight of a winning tactic playing out in crushing victory, or the deep opaque wells Chrom caught sometimes as Robin watched him from across a room filled with festive glee that submerged them full-bodied in an incandescent, transformative joy.

“What’s so interesting that you’re looking at?” Chrom asked.

Robin merely hummed, turning away in an illusion of not seeing Chrom anymore, as if his secondary sensors weren’t able to give him a full 360 view of the world. He unstrapped himself and clambered out of the worn nylon-leather seat, rolling his shoulders with recalibrating clicks as he walked towards the kitchen. Chrom trailed after him.

“Just thinking about something Anna and Gregor mentioned to me in their invoice notes,” Robin eventually answered while pulling out the dried milk powder from the pantry.

“What was it and why are you holding my milk hostage?” Chrom asked warily.

Robin smiled, locking his fingers around the box in an unbreakable grip, and teased, “Chrom, are you so cruel you’d love a robot?”

“I’ll love who I like,” Chrom muttered mutinously, but his heart stuttered because by the Polaris star, if those two said anything about _boyfriends_ to Robin as well, see if Chrom ever brings business to their door again. “Now give me my milk back, you know I want some cocoa.”

“I don’t think I will,” Robin said. He kicked the pantry door shut and began shuffling along the wall as if deciding that if Chrom wanted his milk back, he’d have to chase Robin through the whole ship. “Anna says you were a needy mess the whole time and I have no less than seven messages from Lissa calling you a nightmare. _Frederick_ sent me a message.”

“Am I not allowed to be distressed when my best friend flings himself into danger for my sake, _again_ , and forces me to watch as he’s smashed to pieces right in front of me?” asked Chrom plaintively. And now fuck Robin for forcing him to remember the spray of plastics and lubricants smeared across the ground and the scream of metal twisting as a ripped open body smashed into a pile of metal with enough force to decapitate.

The smile wiped off Robin’s face. He said, “Better me than you. You can’t be rebuilt.”

“That’s not – _that’s not the point at all!_ ” Chrom yelled. “You’re just as irreplaceable.”

“Not as irreplaceable as _your_ organs or _your_ spine,” Robin said, closed off and flat. He threw the milk powder at Chrom with, “Drink your cocoa,” and disappeared into the hall.

* * *

Considering Chrom met Robin via the android quite literally flinging himself into the path of a bullet for Chrom and then performing a hellish set of parkour acrobatics to help Emmeryn off a deteriorating ledge at a lethal height, along with the many other incidents numbered in the double digits where he shoved Chrom out of the way from phasers and blades, using his body as a shield, absolutely no one could accuse Chrom of being unaware of Robin’s self-sacrificing tendencies. Sully reckoned that there was a martyring, penance situation going on. Maribelle thought the protective spirit was just as well and appropriate. Ricken, who had never gotten into a serious fight in his life, mostly thought it was cool.

Chrom thought it was a pain in the ass.

Ever since whatever the hell that exchange was two days ago in the kitchen, Chrom couldn’t find any hint or sign of Robin on their ship. Frustrated, he locked himself into the navigation room, plotting out their course to the rendezvous with Basilio on their star charts, refusing to think about the tension sloshing against the walls.

Was Robin expecting _thanks_ from Chrom for scaring another ten years off his life? Was Robin throwing himself into danger every time things went even slightly wrong supposed to make him _happy_? Did Robin think for a second that this universe would be even a molecule better if he ceased to exist within it, that it wouldn’t deal a grievous blow to Chrom?

Chrom buried his face in his hands, unable to concentrate on the charts. “Gods.”

He slumped over further.

* * *

Chrom was in the middle of biting into a freeze-dried strawberry when Robin suddenly appeared behind him, bursting out, “Do you never think about what it looks like to me when you get wounded? Are you aware of all the ways things can go wrong for you in an organic body? Has Lissa ever told you about all the ways that flesh can get infected or how scar tissue can permanently stiffen your ability to move or how even the best cyborg technology still isn’t anywhere near as good as the original biological limbs and organs? Have you compared how long it takes for you to heal and how long it takes for me to be repaired?”

Coughing on the residual sensation of choking, Chrom turned around, wide-eyed, to Robin standing in the doorway, fists at his side with all his joints locked into place. Whoever built Robin hadn’t built in the ability to cry, but his lips twisted in a pained grimace under narrowed, tired eyes.

“You haven’t considered this at all.”

Robin drew forward towards Chrom frozen with the bag of strawberries stupidly stuck in his grip. Mouth in a grim line and frustration in his shoulders, Robin said, “But that makes no sense, you’re _definitely_ aware of all of these factors. I’ve _seen_ you make these calculations before. What’s so different with me that you can’t trust me with those same facts?”

“What do you mean?” Chrom asked as he managed to set the strawberries down.

“Why don’t you just _trust me_?” Robin asked plaintively.

Chrom gaped in confusion. “Trust you? Of course, I trust you! When have I not trusted you? This isn’t about trust or some facts. How do you expect me to bear it when you’re injured because of me? How do you expect me to bear it when you’re torn to pieces and forced to shut down because you’re protecting me?”

The vibrations of the ship shuddered between them. The motors in Robin’s legs whirred momentarily. Quietly, so quietly Chrom strained to hear it, he said, “But you don’t love me.”

“I don’t need to love you to be this concerned,” replied Chrom, worn out and strained by the last three weeks.

Robin blinked and turned his head away, the low thrum of his fans and motors whining. He jolted as Chrom’s hands took his, repeating, “I don’t need to love you to be this concerned, but…”

Chrom watched Robin’s eyes widen, the shutters and sensors sharpening. “…It helps,” he admitted.

Robin thumped his head – metal, _ouch_ – into Chrom’s shoulder, sighing a hot breath of exhaust. “Asshole, you never said.”

Letting go of Robin’s hands, Chrom instead wrapped his arms around his pain in the ass, self-sacrificing friend. He asked the white hair pressed against his cheek, “Do you even want it?”

Robin wriggled his arm in Chrom’s hold and punched him in the side. “Don’t ask stupid questions. Of course I do.”

**Author's Note:**

> Robin, internally: do you know how many people I would kill for you  
> Chrom, obstinate: isn’t my friend so cool?


End file.
